After her husband Carl Dowerman died five years earlier, Lena Dowerman became the new manager of an apartment building at 30 Bayaud Ave.

Lena Dowerman, 71Courtesy Denver Police Department

The 71-year-old woman, who did not have children, was born in 1899 and lived alone. She knew how dangerous her neighborhood could be.

Ten years before her husband’s death in 1965 he was assaulted by two teens not far from their doorstep.

The first teen approached him on the corner of Broadway and Bayaud just after he had walked out of his front door and asked him for a nickel. He began to walk away and another teen asked him for matches. Both teens then shoved him to the ground, beat him, rifled through his pockets and stole three quarters.

The similarities between the murders sent chills through Denver’s gay community.

Four gay men were stabbed to death in Central Denver in 1992. Police were investigating whether they were all hate crimes committed by the same killer.

Several leaders within the gay community proclaimed their fears that someone was targeting gays in bars, going to their hotels and murdering them.

They worried that the anti-gay-rights Amendment 2, which was passed in November of 1992 may have stirred emotions. Reports of violence against gays and lesbians had increased ninefold in 1992 over 1991.

They complained that Denver police were not investigating the murders as aggressively as other cases because the victims were gay.

Since then only one of the murders has been solved.

The first man killed was James Leroy Holman, 35. He was stabbed in his apartment on the 500 block of East 11th Avenue on Feb. 13, according to news accounts.

Melvin LeRoy Pooley Jr. walked to his dad’s pickup truck, sat inside and waited for him to finish drinking beer in a bar with his pals on a Friday night.

By the time his father, Melvin LeRoy Pooley Sr., returned to the parking lot of Four Wheel Drive Pickup and Truck Sales on West Evans Avenue, where he had left his son, his green 1960s-model International pickup and 14-year-old son were gone.

It wouldn’t be for another three months before Pooley Jr.’s body was found, washed up on the bank of the South Platte River near the 2700 block of South Platte River Drive.

A steel band had been wrapped around Pooley Jr.’s neck and tied to cinder blocks. Poole said he believed that whoever stole his pickup had murdered his son.

But he said Denver police didn’t agree, nor did they seem that interested in solving his son’s case initially when it was a missing person’s case.

They also didn’t seem that interested even after learning his son had been weighted down and tossed in the river.

The detective told him there had been a lot of murders and not enough time to investigate them all thoroughly.

“He knew my son had been in trouble three or four times before,” Pooley Jr. said. “There wasn’t much of an investigation. They had other things they were working on.”

She was a registered nurse and ran a large child daycare center in northeast Denver. She always had a big smile and and cheerful disposition. She loved people and especially children. She could make people laugh.

“Our house was the house where all the the parties happened,” recalled her daughter Lyzette Ashley, 40.

But Ashley said it was also a place where she, her younger brothers and mother were abused by her stepfather.

Jenkins’ sister Lori Reynolds, 54, recalls Lois showing up for family gatherings with bruises on her body.

She always had an excuse. She had tripped and fell or bumped into something.

Reynolds’ older brothers did know about the abuse and wanted to beat her husband up but Jenkins pleaded with them not to because she loved him.

Reynolds later learned that her sister had been beaten by her husband. Although they divorced they were still seeing each other, she said.

In April of 1981, Reynolds, who had been stationed in Japan for the Army, came home for a vacation. She was watching her sister’s children that night when she went out, some say to meet with her husband.

Reynolds was upset with her identification.

That night on April 12, Jenkins drove her mother’s car to a nightclub near the Park Hill Municipal Golf Course.

When Sean May was ambushed at his home on the 3300 block of West 36th Avenue on Aug. 27, 2008, one obvious clue seemed to be what he did for a living.

May, 37, had just been promoted to chief deputy district attorney in Adams county.

After he was killed, a defense attorney came forward and told Denver detectives that shortly before May was gunned down he received a phone call from May, who warned him that the family of someone the man had defended had made some threats.

May told the lawyer to be careful.

Denver police scoured the records of 1,000 felony and 3,000 misdemeanor cases for clues about who would have wished to kill May.

Like many family members of murder victims, Joann Amaro was frustrated that men who must have known who fatally shot her father on June 17, 1980 refused to speak up.

A few days later, frustrated that no arrest had been made in her father Simon’s death, the then 17-year-old girl had an idea how to help witnesses overcome their reluctance to say what they know.

She drove to her father’s house, retrieved something from inside the home, got back in her car and set the thing beside her. Then she headed for Richie’s Bar near the intersection of West 26th Avenue and Federal Boulevard.

That was just like Joann.

She’d never been a shrinking violet. Joann was a bit of a tomboy. It was how she tried to lessen her father’s disappointment about not having the son he always wanted.

Joann was an only child. In some ways she was very spoiled. But her dad also didn’t coddle her.

Simon wanted to steel her for life, which at times could be very difficult.

Sometimes tragedies happened or there were bumps in the road of life, like getting fired from a job. Simon always told his daughter that’s why she needed to be prepared for hardships – always have a fall-back skill.

For example, when his wife pushed him to move inland from the California coast where Simon had a high-paying undersea welding job to Colorado where all her family lived he simply found a new welding job at Asamera Oil Refinery in Commerce City and started working on the side as a landscaper.

“My dad was a manly, macho man,” Joann said. “I was a tomboy. I hung out with my dad all the time.”

When Joann was very young, Simon took her to fields and helped her get a job harvesting vegetables. It wasn’t easy work. She toughed it out, working even when she got blisters and was exhausted.

When he asked her to drive a large pickup to tree farms to pick loads of trees to deliver to landscapers, she put her gloves on and did what she could.

Fifteen-year-old Tracy Lynn Wooden hurt her knee bad enough that she needed medical attention on Aug. 11, 1985. A doctor treated her and she was released from the hospital in the early morning hours the next morning.

But after her discharge, Tracy vanished.

Her parents who lived in Washington Park filed a missing person report.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.